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2 waterfront park. There was some discussion that
3 maybe we're not consistent with the Waterfront
4 Revitalization Program?
5 If you look at Chapter 12 in the
6 EIS, which is entirely devoted to the ten policy
7 statements of the Waterfront Revitalization Program,
8 we go through each and every one, and although the
9 law doesn't require that you comply with it and you
10 don't even have to comply with every policy, we
11 comply with every single one.
12 This waterfront -- I don't know if you've
13 ever been to Red Hook, your Honor. This waterfront
14 has been closed off. It is -- I can't get there; you
15 can't get there. It is a magnificent waterfront. It
16 is going to be open and available not just to Red
17 Hook residents, but to people like myself from
18 Brooklyn who will use this waterfront park.
19 So in terms of consistency with the
20 Waterfront Revitalization Plan, there has been
21 nothing like this in the City of New York.
22 THE COURT: My guess is that their biggest
23 concern, putting aside the "blue-and-yellow box," is
24 that --
25 MS. BINDER: Which I believe is the color
26 of the Swedish flag, your Honor.
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2 THE COURT: I understand that.
3 MS. BINDER: Okay.
4 THE COURT: So let's not say anything or
5 we'll have a diplomatic problem.
6 MS. BINDER: Yes.
7 THE COURT: But their biggest concern is
8 the one of traffic, and let's be honest: With Cunard
9 coming in, and I know because -- when I go up the
10 West Side Highway, I know the traffic that comes in
11 when the ships come in.
12 So you've got Cunard coming in soon;
13 you've got Fairway's that's going to get built;
14 you've got -- you know, this community is going from
15 an underdeveloped, perhaps, community to, all of a
16 sudden, getting all of this at once and the traffic
17 is going to be a nightmare. Nobody can say that --
18 and if they do, they're not being truthful. There is
19 going to be a nightmare of traffic and you -- you
20 know, if you lived there, you would say, you know,
21 This does not make me a happy person.
22 MS. BINDER: Let me address the traffic.
23 THE COURT: Go ahead.
24 MS. BINDER: Ikea was obviously very
25 concerned about traffic. They want their customers
26 to be able to get to the store and to come back
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2 again. So when we did our traffic analysis, we
3 didn't just comply with SEQRA.
4 SEQRA tells you, you have to create what's
5 called, like, the reasonable worst-case scenario to
6 study.
7 THE COURT: Right.
8 MS. BINDER: Ikea told its consultant,
9 Sam Schwartz -- "Gridlock Sam"? You may have heard
10 of him -- and we did this with the DOT -- that we
11 wanted to look at the worst-case scenario.
12 So what we did is, when we were projecting
13 how much traffic, we looked -- there's a few stores.
14 There's one in Hicksville. Elizabeth is the busiest
15 store that Ikea has. Ikea took the sales-days
16 vehicle trips from the Elizabeth store, which only
17 happened eight percent of the time, which is -- you
18 know, rarely occurs but yet it is the busiest; it
19 took that eight-percent vehicle trips, it laid it
20 over the peak hours that exist on the Gowanus and the
21 BQE, even if they didn't coincide, and they said,
22 Let's look at this traffic. The results from that
23 traffic, that's what they used to create mitigation.
24 And every single traffic impact has been
25 mitigated.
26 As your Honor is probably well aware,
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2 SEQRA doesn't require you to mitigate every impact.
3 It's a disclosure document.
4 THE COURT: Right.
5 MS. BINDER: But Ikea doesn't want to just
6 disclose; Ikea wants to mitigate. So they mitigated
7 every single traffic impact.
8 Which brings me to the BQE and the
9 Gowanus, this sense that we didn't study it. Of
10 course we studied it. It's right in page 1 of the
11 traffic analysis.
12 But we didn't just say, Oh -- even the
13 aerial photographs of it. But what our traffic
14 consultant did is not just look at the BQE and the
15 Gowanus, but he said, Let's look at -- which is
16 consistent with City policy, and he's been doing this
17 for 20-odd years -- Let's look at the exit ramps,
18 because, really, the exit ramps are what really back
19 up. Yeah, the highway is -- it's a crowded highway
20 but the exit ramps are what's really difficult.
21 Not just the Hamilton Avenue exit ramp,
22 which is the exit that everybody will take. He said:
23 You know what? Let's look at the 38th Street exit
24 ramp, which is the one before it, because savvy New
25 Yorkers will take other ways, and that's where the
26 studies were done.
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2 And as part of this project, they ended
3 up making an exit right out of the Battery Tunnel and
4 the BQE, that there's going to be a dedicated lane
5 for this new traffic; not to mention a host of other
6 traffic improvements, which, again I have to say,
7 are unprecedented.
8 So that's the BQE.
9 Let me --
10 We talked about the Waterfront Plan.
11 THE COURT: Right.
12 MS. BINDER: The 197-A Plan.
13 You asked, and I think the question has
14 been answered. It's really a policy guide. The law
15 itself says that it's a policy guide and does not
16 bind the City agencies to take an action that's
17 contrary to the plan. And the Red Hook 197-A plan
18 that was adopted in 1996 makes the same comment.
19 But, in any event, what the EIS does is,
20 it goes through each of the policies in the 197-A
21 Plan -- economic revitalization, waterfront usage --
22 and talks about how we are in compliance with the
23 plan.
24 THE COURT: Okay.
25 Let me just give her another second.
26 MS. BRYSON: Yeah.
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2 THE COURT: Thank you.
3 Yeah, just respond.
4 MS. BRYSON: I have a rebut, rebut, rebut.
5 The 197-A Plan, as we've proved in our
6 papers, is what's called a "Master Plan." A Master
7 Plan has a particular status. It's not just a policy
8 document; it is the planning document that the City
9 Planning Commission must pay attention to. It has
10 the power to change, but as long as it's in effect,
11 it's an important plan, official plan, for the City
12 of New York.
13 THE COURT: And your argument there is
14 that you don't see enough evidence that they've
15 considered it.
16 MS. BRYSON: Right.
17 THE COURT: You're not saying they can't
18 change it. You're just saying there's not enough
19 evidence that they considered it.
20 MS. BRYSON: And it's more than just one
21 of many policy documents; it is the Master Plan for
22 the area.
23 THE COURT: Two.
24 MS. BRYSON: They are misrepresenting
25 what their own papers say about consideration of
26 the Gowanus and the other highways. They have an
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2 affidavit from one of their experts, saying what I'm
3 complaining about is true, which is, they didn't look
4 at the impact on the highways.
5 What they did look at, and I don't dispute
6 this, is, they looked -- they looked at the highways
7 to see how crowded they were, so they could judge
8 how many people would get off an exit early and they
9 would feed that into their calculations about impacts
10 at local intersections. That's what they looked at.
11 They did not look at: Will the Gowanus --
12 will traveling on the Gowanus -- be a lot worse than
13 it was before the Ikea was in place? They did not
14 look at that, and they concede they did not look at
15 that by the Amjadi affidavit.
16 The public-access point, your Honor, I
17 think we've rebutted that in our reply papers to the
18 extent that, of course, we all love public access but
19 it's not supposed to be here. It's supposed to be --
20 Red Hook has some lovely public access that's in
21 development and it's going to have more, and this is
22 not the site for public access. So to tout that as
23 the whole reason for the project is not appropriate.
24 And finally, of course, Ikea wants
25 their customers to have easy travel routes to the
26 stadium --
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2 Wow, that's a faux pas.
3 -- to Ikea; they want the people who are
4 traveling in those cars from outside Red Hook to be
5 able to zip in and out as quickly as possible.
6 That's not what the people in the community want,
7 of course.
8 And eight percent of the sale days is --
9 THE COURT: No, no. What the people in
10 the community want is not to have congestion, so they
11 can come and go and do their business; right?
12 MS. BRYSON: Yes.
13 THE COURT: Okay.
14 MS. BRYSON: Yes.
15 THE COURT: Go ahead.
16 And what was the last thing?
17 MS. BRYSON: It doesn't deal with my
18 neighborhood-character point about the volume of
19 traffic.
20 Eight percent of sale days, by the way,
21 is a month out of the year, so it's not insignificant
22 that these heavy volumes are going to be there for
23 eight percent of the days.
24 THE COURT: Say that again? Eight percent
25 of what?
26 MS. BRYSON: Eight --
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2 THE COURT: I know what Miss Binder said,
3 so what are you saying it represents?
4 MS. BRYSON: One month of days.
5 THE COURT: Okay.
6 MS. BRYSON: And finally --
7 THE COURT: Go ahead.
8 MS. BRYSON: -- this is why I said
9 "stadium" -- no, this is not the Jets stadium,
10 because -- and one reason it's not the Jets stadium
11 is because Ikea -- the people who are opposing
12 it here are not supported or funded by any other
13 organization opposing this Ikea. They are doing this
14 out of their deeply-held belief that it is wrong for
15 this neighborhood; whereas Ikea went in and did do a
16 very professional job here and it cultivated sections
17 of the community, brought them to community meetings
18 and educated them as to their point of view as to
19 what the Ikea would represent, and that was, in part,
20 successful.
21 So we have the deeply-felt beliefs of
22 members of the community who are here opposing this
23 versus Ikea's professional work in terms of other
24 segments of the community.
25 THE COURT: Is there anything you need to
26 correct or can we move on?
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2 MR. GREENE: Your Honor, the statement
3 about volume and neighborhood character is on record
4 811.
5 THE COURT: 811?
6 MR. GREENE: Yes.
7 THE COURT: Okay.
8 Then, there being nothing else, thank you
9 very much.
10 The decision's reserved.
11 Thank you all very much.
12 MS. BRYSON: Thank you, your Honor.
13 * * *
14 CERTIFIED to be a true and accurate transcript
of the proceedings.
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